Throughout graduate school, I’ve made the habit of at least glancing over job announcements that find their way into my inbox. In past years, I’ve selfishly rued those that advertise especially attractive positions, wondering if maybe they could have afforded to wait a couple more years. Now, as summer winds down, those announcements are taking on new importance and urgency. There’s no more bemoaning good jobs that I’m not ready to apply for. I’m on the market now.
Being in a position to start applying for jobs is certainly exciting. At the very least, it reflects how far I’ve come in writing my dissertation and my committee’s faith in my ability to forge ahead. Let’s all take a moment to bask in that.
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Of course, I’m even more excited about the future. It feels like I’ve been in graduate school forever, but it’s not a permanent phase of life. I’m looking forward to settling into a faculty position and developing my research, teaching, and service profile on a firmer basis. I’m excited to join a new academic community and be in a better position to invest in its long-term health than I am as a graduate student.
Naturally, I also feel some anxiety about the job market. Even getting a job isn’t a sure bet. In case you haven’t heard, the market for new PhD’s seeking faculty positions in history is pretty tight. (See figure 3 in the AHA’s annual job report.) Fortunately, this year isn’t necessarily make-or-break for me. At the same time that I’m applying for jobs, I’ll also be applying for write-up fellowships. These would give me funding to keep working on my dissertation, rework my application materials, prepare a new publication or two, and come back to the job market stronger next year. Another, in-between possibility is a post-doc. That would essentially buy me some more time to improve my profile and get a head start on revising the dissertation into a book and even starting a second project, but with better pay and more prestige than a write-up.
The tight competition for jobs and small number available in a given field in any given year mean that even if I do get a job, there’s really no telling where it will be. People often ask where I want to go. I usually respond with a laugh that thinly disguises a serious explanation of this reality. Of course there are some places I’d rather go than others, but I haven’t made a list. And even if I did, it would be almost entirely an exercise in wishful thinking. If I have the great fortune to consider more than one offer
I realize this can make it difficult for those of you who know PhD students heading on the job market. To be fair, even graduate students struggle to talk to each other positively about the market. Kind words of encouragement are always welcome, but please don’t be offended if your resident grad student’s face doesn’t light up when you say you’re sure they’ll get a job. This is one time when the search committee’s opinion matters even more than Mom’s.
I’ve found myself reflecting back to a couple years ago when I was waiting to hear back about research grants. Back then, I compared this competitive and arbitrary process to “the claw” that picks out eager but powerless pinions from the toy pit. My conclusion was that the best way to wait productively was focusing on the things I could control and not judging my entire life on by the arbitrary standards of academia. To be fair, those standards have been generous to me since then, but now I’m facing another career-defining juncture. There are still tangible and important things within my control, namely, the dissertation. However, even now, the dissertation feels so large that it is hard to see it as entirely in my grasp. It is certainly more than capable of producing enough anxieties and insecurities of its own.
This is, then, as good a time as any to step away, or at least back from the cords tying my intellectual and professional interests to the academic career I imagine. Exploring alternative careers and finding new outlets for historical interests and skills is one way to go about this. For a variety of reasons, that’s not going to be possible for me this year. Instead, teaching is going to be my primary way of stepping out of the shadow of dissertation and job market applications. This may seem counterintuitive, since teaching is very much associated with an academic career. However, since I haven’t done a great deal of teaching the last couple of years, am teaching my own classes for the first time, and am teaching outside my home institution, this experience is fresh and exciting for me. I will still be “doing history” but in a way that is very different from and more immediately impactful than sitting at my desk and reading primary texts and writing.
So what do you say to a PhD student on the job market? Rather than focusing on the tasks at-hand or the uncertainties of the job market, it might help to ask about what they are looking forward to in a future job, whatever it is. Graduate school can be wonderful, but we all have our reasons for wanting to move on to something else. Those motivations will keep being important no matter where we wind up working.